Pretty generally, among the social primates, individuals pay attention to higher status individuals. High status individuals are the ones who might have something to offer you. Alternately, they are the ones with the resources to attack you. You need to keep track of where they are; what they are doing; what they are interested in; who *they* are looking at.
Just walking down the street, a rich person sees fewer richer people around him than a poor person, and thus, fewer people that he needs to pay attention to. Transport some of those rich people to, say, North by North West, or a political party convention, and you will probably see them paying close attention to those around them.
We need a Department of Bricking (DOB). An agency of the federal government that is staffed, funded, and mandated to find and brick every device on the internet. Don't want your device bricked? Secure it. Device bricked? Your problem. Maybe you should complain to the vendor.
Mid-20th century newsreels--an important history of the time--are sitting on shelves in film canisters, quietly disintegrating.
There are people who would like to copy them forward onto durable media, but they can't because the newsreels are copyrighted, but the copyright holders either can't be located or aren't interested in preserving them.
They will be dust long before they enter the public domain.
With good reason, the people of the United States -- through judges and law enforcement -- can invade our private spaces," Comey said, adding that that "bargain" has been at the center of the country since its inception
It's not a bargain, it's a tradeoff.
A bargain is something you strike with some other party that has something you want. You give them something; they give you something.
There is no other party here. It's our society; our country; our government. We make the rules. We face a (putative) tradeoff between privacy and security. It is entirely on us how we make that tradeoff.
I've thought about this. How did a catastrophe like PHP come to be so widely used? I've come up with two answers.
1. Historical accident There was a need for a PHP-like language to write web back-ends. It could have been Perl, or Python, or PHP, or Ruby, or probably any of a hundred others. At some point, some language gains critical mass. Then everyone uses it because everyone uses it, and we're off to the races. Which language is first to critical mass is--at least somewhat--a matter of chance. As it happens, it was PHP.
2. The default behavior of the language processor is to emit the entire program text on STDOUT. What this means is that you can take an entire existing static web site--a whole tree of static HTML pages--declare them to be PHP scripts, et voila, there is your web site, just like it was before, except that now you can start adding $variables to your pages and creating dynamic content. It gives managers and salesmen and marketing people and non-programmers a way to get into the game without actually having to do any of that--you know--programming stuff.
Calling this an easy learning curve misapprehends the situation. It is more in the "this one weird trick" category.
The actual PHP learning curve is vertical, which is to say, no one can learn PHP. The language is such a tangled mass of inconsistencies, exceptions, breakage and lossage that acquiring the knowledge necessary to use it competently is virtually impossible.
Actually, people did die. Marginal increases in air pollution cause marginal increases in deaths, mainly due to assorted respiratory ailments. Just because we don't know who they are doesn't make the victims any less dead.
The word is the only system of encoding thoughts—the only medium—that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media. —Neal Stephenson, In The Beginning Was The Command Line
the only way Windows will become truly stable [...] will be for it to adopt a UNIX architecture
Not going to happen.
I left Windows years ago, partly for the reason that the OS was so badly engineered.
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Microsoft needs lock-in to maintain their monopoly, and lock-in needs incompatibility.
An OS is its architecture. If Windows adopts a Unix architecture, then Windows becomes Unix. If Windows becomes Unix, then customers have their choice: Windows, Linux, BSD, whatever. No more lock-in, no more monopoly, no more Microsoft.
And the "badly engineered" part? Well, Unix OSs tend to be well engineered. And if the defining characteristic of Windows is that it is incompatible with well engineered OSs, then pretty much of necessity Windows is going to be badly engineered.
There is no issue. There is nothing to address. Windows 10 upgrade is doing what Microsoft wants it to do: maximizing the number of machines running Windows 10.
Think about it this way. If you pay a vendor for something, then--at some level--that vendor will serve you. If you do not pay a vendor for their product, then that vendor does not serve you. They may serve some other revenue stream, like advertising, or some kind of big-data analytics that they hope to sell, but they definitely do not serve you. If you are not paying for the product, then you are collateral damage, or prey, or fodder: something to be harvested and packaged for resale.
Somewhere in Microsoft is a VP who is in charge of the Windows 10 upgrade. This VP has been told that his bonus, or stock options, or possibly his job is dependent on getting X million Windows 10 installs, or X million installs per month, or something. He doesn't care how many people are inconvenienced, or lose data, or have their machines bricked. He doesn't care how much bad PR Microsoft gets, or how much bad trade press, or how many outraged Slashdot comments there are. All he cares about is making his number. And this is going to continue until the CEO goes to this VP and changes his performance objectives.
Suppose it was an undercover drug deal. The cops sell him X grams of cocaine in exchange for $1500 in bitcoins. Then they charge him with buying drugs. When it comes to trial, he pleads that he didn't know they were cops; he never would have bought the drugs if he knew they were cops. Does this matter? Not at all. Buying drugs is illegal. It doesn't matter who he bought them from, or whether he knew they were cops.
Now suppose his attorney say OK, let's see the drugs. And the cops dutifully produce a bag of white powder, and they send it out to be tested, and the test shows that it is 100% primo Dominos 10X confectioner's sugar. And his lawyer says, "Hey! He's charged with buying drugs; where are the drugs?" And the cops say, "Oh, you know, it's such a hassle checking out drugs from the evidence locker; all this paper work; all these forms; god help you if it comes back a gram light... We just went down to store and bought some powdered sugar. But it doesn't matter: we told him it was drugs; he obviously thought it was drugs or he wouldn't have paid $1500 for it." Does this matter? Absolutely. It doesn't matter what he thought: he did not do the illegal thing that he is charged with: he did not buy drugs. He walks.
Now look at this case. The cops paid him $1500 cash for bitcoins. They told him they were going to buy stolen credit cards with the bitcoins. Now maybe, if they had actually bought stolen credit cards with the bitcoins, they could have charged him with being some kind of accessory to that crime. But they didn't. There was no crime. There were never any credit cards. There wasn't even a bag of white powder. All they've got is a story. A story that he believed. Or not. Maybe he didn't know whether it was true. Maybe he didn't care. Sure, sure, you guys want to be leet haxorz buying credit cards? You got $1500 cash you can be James Bond, you can be Tony Stark, whatever.
I do not understand how this guy gets charged in connection with a crime that did not occur.
Bill Nye proposes a similar scheme, using giant pistons lifting weight instead of driving a train uphill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... starting at 7:40.
~100 Americans die in auto accidents every day. (I think recent numbers are closer to 90.)
Any time I hear about some new thing that I'm supposed to be afraid of, I ask, Is it killing 100 American a day, *every* *day*? And if it isn't, then I get in my car, and I *fasten my seat belt*, and I don't worry about it too much.
The word "definition" is used in different senses. The alphabet/dictionary/grammar are more properly referred to as a "specification". They help you decide whether a given character string is a valid Java program. But the language is not the specification: the language is the collection of strings that satisfy the specification.
It's like saying, what is the definition of the set of prime numbers. People will typically say something like, "the set of numbers with no divisors except for one and the number". But that phrase is not the set of prime numbers: it is rule for deciding whether a number is prime. The set of prime numbers is this set: { 2, 3, 5, 7, 11,... } (you know the one I mean).
In the Oracle vs. Google Java case, the judge asked the parties, "Can the Java programming language be copyrighted?" It seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.
The definition of the Java programming language is, "the set of all Java programs". This is an infinite set. Therefore it cannot be fixed in a tangible medium. Therefore it cannot be copyrighted.
It seems like a similar argument should prevail here.
Clapper lied, under oath, to congress. He was given the questions he would be asked, in writing, before hand. He lied when asked those questions. When asked afterwards, in writing, if he wanted to amend any of his answers, he declined. He only admitted the truth after it came out in the Snowden revelations.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty generally, among the social primates, individuals pay attention to higher status individuals.
High status individuals are the ones who might have something to offer you.
Alternately, they are the ones with the resources to attack you.
You need to keep track of where they are; what they are doing; what they are interested in; who *they* are looking at.
Just walking down the street, a rich person sees fewer richer people around him than a poor person, and thus, fewer people that he needs to pay attention to. Transport some of those rich people to, say, North by North West, or a political party convention, and you will probably see them paying close attention to those around them.
We need a Department of Bricking (DOB).
An agency of the federal government that is staffed, funded, and mandated to find and brick every device on the internet.
Don't want your device bricked? Secure it.
Device bricked? Your problem. Maybe you should complain to the vendor.
It is happening as we speak.
Mid-20th century newsreels--an important history of the time--are sitting on shelves in film canisters, quietly disintegrating.
There are people who would like to copy them forward onto durable media, but they can't because the newsreels are copyrighted, but the copyright holders either can't be located or aren't interested in preserving them.
They will be dust long before they enter the public domain.
Like ntpd?
Are there people who want to talk to bots about "popular topics and news events"?
I mean, really?
I don't.
Robots? 6%? Phhh. Small stuff.
100 years ago, tractors eliminated, like, 80%-90% of all US jobs.
Boy, I miss the farm. Plowing, hoeing, raking, weeding; day after day, year after year, endless hard manual labor. Yeah, those were the days....
It's not a bargain, it's a tradeoff.
A bargain is something you strike with some other party that has something you want. You give them something; they give you something.
There is no other party here. It's our society; our country; our government. We make the rules. We face a (putative) tradeoff between privacy and security. It is entirely on us how we make that tradeoff.
http://assets.amuniversal.com/...
I've thought about this.
How did a catastrophe like PHP come to be so widely used?
I've come up with two answers.
1. Historical accident
There was a need for a PHP-like language to write web back-ends. It could have been Perl, or Python, or PHP, or Ruby, or probably any of a hundred others. At some point, some language gains critical mass. Then everyone uses it because everyone uses it, and we're off to the races. Which language is first to critical mass is--at least somewhat--a matter of chance. As it happens, it was PHP.
2. The default behavior of the language processor is to emit the entire program text on STDOUT.
What this means is that you can take an entire existing static web site--a whole tree of static HTML pages--declare them to be PHP scripts, et voila, there is your web site, just like it was before, except that now you can start adding $variables to your pages and creating dynamic content. It gives managers and salesmen and marketing people and non-programmers a way to get into the game without actually having to do any of that--you know--programming stuff.
Calling this an easy learning curve misapprehends the situation. It is more in the "this one weird trick" category.
The actual PHP learning curve is vertical, which is to say, no one can learn PHP. The language is such a tangled mass of inconsistencies, exceptions, breakage and lossage that acquiring the knowledge necessary to use it competently is virtually impossible.
Sounds like copyright infringement.
Maybe the BSA should get on the case.
Actually, people did die.
Marginal increases in air pollution cause marginal increases in deaths, mainly due to assorted respiratory ailments.
Just because we don't know who they are doesn't make the victims any less dead.
Until Netflix actually starts showing ads, it's just talk.
If Netflix does start showing ads, then people either will or will not cancel.
That is true market data, which is very cool.
Market data is difficult to acquire and valuable to have.
If Netflix does this experiment, they probably won't be posting the results on Slashdot.
The word is the only system of encoding thoughts—the only medium—that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media.
—Neal Stephenson, In The Beginning Was The Command Line
Not going to happen.
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Microsoft needs lock-in to maintain their monopoly, and lock-in needs incompatibility.
An OS is its architecture.
If Windows adopts a Unix architecture, then Windows becomes Unix.
If Windows becomes Unix, then customers have their choice: Windows, Linux, BSD, whatever.
No more lock-in, no more monopoly, no more Microsoft.
And the "badly engineered" part? Well, Unix OSs tend to be well engineered. And if the defining characteristic of Windows is that it is incompatible with well engineered OSs, then pretty much of necessity Windows is going to be badly engineered.
There is no issue.
There is nothing to address.
Windows 10 upgrade is doing what Microsoft wants it to do: maximizing the number of machines running Windows 10.
Think about it this way.
If you pay a vendor for something, then--at some level--that vendor will serve you.
If you do not pay a vendor for their product, then that vendor does not serve you. They may serve some other revenue stream, like advertising, or some kind of big-data analytics that they hope to sell, but they definitely do not serve you. If you are not paying for the product, then you are collateral damage, or prey, or fodder: something to be harvested and packaged for resale.
Somewhere in Microsoft is a VP who is in charge of the Windows 10 upgrade.
This VP has been told that his bonus, or stock options, or possibly his job is dependent on getting X million Windows 10 installs, or X million installs per month, or something. He doesn't care how many people are inconvenienced, or lose data, or have their machines bricked. He doesn't care how much bad PR Microsoft gets, or how much bad trade press, or how many outraged Slashdot comments there are. All he cares about is making his number. And this is going to continue until the CEO goes to this VP and changes his performance objectives.
Deal with it.
(Linux works for me. YMMV.)
I have a real problem with this case.
Suppose it was an undercover drug deal. The cops sell him X grams of cocaine in exchange for $1500 in bitcoins. Then they charge him with buying drugs. When it comes to trial, he pleads that he didn't know they were cops; he never would have bought the drugs if he knew they were cops. Does this matter? Not at all. Buying drugs is illegal. It doesn't matter who he bought them from, or whether he knew they were cops.
Now suppose his attorney say OK, let's see the drugs. And the cops dutifully produce a bag of white powder, and they send it out to be tested, and the test shows that it is 100% primo Dominos 10X confectioner's sugar. And his lawyer says, "Hey! He's charged with buying drugs; where are the drugs?" And the cops say, "Oh, you know, it's such a hassle checking out drugs from the evidence locker; all this paper work; all these forms; god help you if it comes back a gram light... We just went down to store and bought some powdered sugar. But it doesn't matter: we told him it was drugs; he obviously thought it was drugs or he wouldn't have paid $1500 for it." Does this matter? Absolutely. It doesn't matter what he thought: he did not do the illegal thing that he is charged with: he did not buy drugs. He walks.
Now look at this case. The cops paid him $1500 cash for bitcoins. They told him they were going to buy stolen credit cards with the bitcoins. Now maybe, if they had actually bought stolen credit cards with the bitcoins, they could have charged him with being some kind of accessory to that crime. But they didn't. There was no crime. There were never any credit cards. There wasn't even a bag of white powder. All they've got is a story. A story that he believed. Or not. Maybe he didn't know whether it was true. Maybe he didn't care. Sure, sure, you guys want to be leet haxorz buying credit cards? You got $1500 cash you can be James Bond, you can be Tony Stark, whatever.
I do not understand how this guy gets charged in connection with a crime that did not occur.
Bill Nye proposes a similar scheme, using giant pistons lifting weight instead of driving a train uphill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... starting at 7:40.
Rube Goldberg...call for Mr. Rube Goldberg...
I've gotten the black links on one of my machines.
Functionality aside, they're just ugly.
...is automobiles.
~100 Americans die in auto accidents every day.
(I think recent numbers are closer to 90.)
Any time I hear about some new thing that I'm supposed to be afraid of, I ask, Is it killing 100 American a day, *every* *day*?
And if it isn't, then I get in my car, and I *fasten my seat belt*, and I don't worry about it too much.
Actually, no.
Air conditioning the desert seems extravagant, but it needs less energy than heating in northern climes.
The word "definition" is used in different senses. The alphabet/dictionary/grammar are more properly referred to as a "specification". They help you decide whether a given character string is a valid Java program. But the language is not the specification: the language is the collection of strings that satisfy the specification.
It's like saying, what is the definition of the set of prime numbers. People will typically say something like, "the set of numbers with no divisors except for one and the number". But that phrase is not the set of prime numbers: it is rule for deciding whether a number is prime. The set of prime numbers is this set: { 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, ... } (you know the one I mean).
See also: This is not a pipe.
In the Oracle vs. Google Java case, the judge asked the parties, "Can the Java programming language be copyrighted?"
It seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.
The definition of the Java programming language is, "the set of all Java programs".
This is an infinite set.
Therefore it cannot be fixed in a tangible medium.
Therefore it cannot be copyrighted.
It seems like a similar argument should prevail here.
Clapper lied, under oath, to congress.
He was given the questions he would be asked, in writing, before hand.
He lied when asked those questions.
When asked afterwards, in writing, if he wanted to amend any of his answers, he declined.
He only admitted the truth after it came out in the Snowden revelations.
Why would anyone now believe anything he says?
This is either creepy or incoherent.
John Chen
Merriam-Webster
What could your reputation be, other than the assessment of people as to whether you are acting for the greater good?